There is No Wall

By Allie Bailey

There Is No Wall is ultrarunner Allie Bailey's brutally honest and sometimes shocking account of alcoholism, depression and severe mental breakdowns which almost cost her her life.
Told with disarming vulnerability, heartbreaking depth of feeling and dark humour, this isn't a story about how running saved her – she was already running and at the height of her struggles sometimes even winning 100-mile-plus races. But somewhere between the darkest excesses of the music industry and the simple beauty of the ultrarunning scene, Allie found space to listen, learn and put into practice techniques that would go on to save her life and change it for the better.
There Is No Wall is a story about how doing something you love can lead you to achieve things you never thought possible. Running won't save you, but it might buy you the time to save yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781839812194

Allie Bailey

Allie Bailey is an ultrarunner, coach, speaker and podcaster who has run in some of the most extreme places in the world. She was the first woman to run 100 miles across frozen Lake Khövsgöl in Mongolia and to run the full length of the Panama Canal. She has crossed the inhospitable Namib Desert three times, run the length of the Outer Hebrides and completed a 1,000-mile off-road version of the classic Land’s End to John o’Groats route in just thirty days. Allie has finished over 200 marathons and ultramarathons all over the world, but the most remarkable thing about all of these achievements is that she accomplished most of them while battling depression and alcoholism. Although running ultimately became the vehicle that helped buy Allie the time to recover from a number of severe mental health breakdowns, it did not save her. In fact, there were times when it made her battle all the more difficult. After a seismic mental health crisis in 2021, Allie finally admitted to herself and those around her that she was an alcoholic and started her recovery. She left behind a dream career with major record labels and adventure companies and now works as a coach with a broad range of runners and endurance athletes, helping them unlock their full potential. In 2022, she was named as one of the most inspiring female adventurers in the UK by The Guardian, and she has appeared on numerous mainstream TV programmes including The One Show and Lorraine. She lives in Yorkshire with her rescue dog, Pickle.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

THE STORIES WE BELIEVE ARE THE ONES WE TELL OURSELVES THE MOST

Listen to: ‘Ready to Start’ – Arcade Fire

Apparently, there are a few guaranteed ways to absolutely captivate you, dear reader, and ensure that from the very first word you’re locked in to this book and you never, ever want to put it down. These methods include but are not limited to: recounting a distressing scene from the beginning of my life; casually describing a situation fraught with danger; writing about a horrifying event that shattered my very existence; or pinpointing the exact moment I realised something was terribly wrong. The problem with these techniques is that this book is actually a horrible cocktail of every single one of them. All 192 pages of it are full of that shit, so I kind of feel that mentioning any of them specifically is a bit spoilerish. Spoiler: this book is a bit miserable! So, instead of wowing you with some kind of sad-bomb, I’ll start with a little introduction.

Hello, I’m Allie. I’m a forty-two-year-old recovering alcoholic depressive who likes running very long races in very hilly places and who talks to her dog like she’s actually a child. I used to work in the music industry, but now I teach people how to run really, really far, how not to be a dick to themselves and how to change their way of thinking from car-crashy self-loathing to way more helpful self-lovin’; some people call me a coach. I am now also an author, and that is fucking cool.

I don’t have any huge achievements to describe here. I’m not ‘special’ in that way. The one and only world record I had a hand in isn’t that cool, I don’t have any solo fastest known times and my world-first list isn’t one that most other runners or adventurers would trade off. To all intents and purposes, I’m actually very, very ordinary, and I think it’s important we start there – because what happened to me can happen to anyone. Addiction and Fucking Depression™ don’t discriminate. People discriminate, people assume and people say, ‘It’ll never happen to me’. But it can, and it does, and maybe it is right now. Maybe that’s why you’re reading this book. Maybe it’s because you’re worried about someone you love. Maybe it’s because you have a feeling something isn’t right and you’re looking for an answer. Whatever the reason, thank you. I hope you find some of my words beneficial.

While I was writing this book, people would obviously ask me what it was about. ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘it’s about a depressed alcoholic who realises her dream job is killing her, gets super into running and then stumbles through life a miserable fucking wreck doing ridiculous things, running ridiculous races until her whole life falls apart and then … ’ And then ... my commissioning editor would sweep in – either in real life or on social media – and say something like, ‘but it’s full of hope, honesty and remarkable achievements; it’s really helpful! Honestly it is! It’s inspiring! It’s insightful’, and I would just sort of walk off because I don’t like it when people are nice about me. I find it incredibly hard to describe what this book is about without sounding like a knob. I’ll give it a go anyway.

I wrote this book to help people. I wrote it so people could feel seen, heard and understood; so they could feel comfort rather than judgement; and hopefully so they could work out what to do next if any of it felt relatable. I’m hoping that you, lovely reader, will be able to relate to it in some way, whether you run or not. Maybe cycling is your thing, maybe you’re a triathlete (deepest sympathies), or maybe you don’t do anything silly like that at all. Hopefully you can get something out of it whether you relate to the sporty bits or not. Just replace the word ‘running’ with ‘fly fishing’ or ‘figure skating’ or ‘origami competitions’ in your head. Hopefully it works.

I wrote this book so that people could understand what it is like to be depressed, to be an addict and to still lead what appears to be a pretty awesome life. I wrote it so people could understand that addicts are everywhere, apparently functioning like normal people. So are the depressed. They walk among us like there is nothing wrong, and then one day they are gone, and you ask yourself what you could have done. This book might help with that. I also wrote it so people could see that there is hope and there is the chance to recover, because at my worst times, for many years, I had no hope at all. I just thought that this was the way it was; that I was broken and would never be fixed.

For most addicts, addiction isn’t the tabloidy social media folk devil that society likes to push at us. It’s not being slumped in a gutter, shitting yourself in the street or losing your house, job or family. I’m sure that does happen, but it didn’t quite happen to me.

And ultrarunning isn’t the shiny UTMB-esque social media sport that society would have us believe it is either – although I have defo been found slumped against a few walls and shat myself as a result of running ultras. That has absolutely happened.

And the two of them together? Substance addiction and ultrarunning? NOPE. They can’t possibly exist together. How can an alcoholic run hundreds and hundreds of miles and keep doing it for years? It’s just not a thing. It’s just not possible. But it is a thing, and it is possible. I am an ultrarunner, and for a very long time I did that as a functioning alcoholic. Running didn’t stop me drinking. Sometimes it actually encouraged and enabled my drinking. I still suffer from sporadic and sometimes crippling episodes of depression. Running hasn’t stopped that either.

I love running, I love the sport, and I love that I am still here and still able to do the things I do. But let me make this clear from the very start: it wasn’t running that saved me from addiction or depression. And it won’t save you, either.

For a long time, I used running alongside booze as both a balancer and a facilitator. I also used running as a measure of my self-worth and to prove to myself and others that I was ‘not ill’. I’d go as far as to say that not only did it not save me, at times it also went some of the way towards damaging me further, in the short term at least.

At times, running has crushed me, broken me and made me feel like utter shit. It has shattered my heart and left me bereft. It has frightened me, flogged me and fucked me up. It has promised the world and delivered nothing, and it has made me feel like I am just not good enough. But it has also given me a lot. It has held a big old mirror up to me and forced me to look at exactly what was going on, even when I didn’t want to see it or acknowledge it; even when I ignored it. It has shown me acceptance, community, even love, and it has bought me the time and the insights I needed to sort my shit out on more than one occasion. Running, but more specifically ultrarunning, is both the most brutal and the most beautiful way to test the stuff therapists talk about in their little rooms. It not only allowed me the space to test myself when I started to get well again, but it also gave me the time to do that. Ultrarunning was the awakening, the reckoning and the realising that led to me being able to sit here and write this today.

I am the subject of this book, which makes me feel like a semi-psychotic narcissist, but I am all I know so you’ll have to deal with it. While the book is about my experience, it may also be a book about you, or who you once were, or who you want to be. It may be about your friend or brother or sister. It’s a book about the confusion and fire that has raged in my head for as long as I can remember, and about the hope, patience and fight it took to get out the other side, not once but loads and loads of times. It’s about parts of my life that, pieced together, make me who I am now. It’s about getting to a place that I never thought possible while fighting a fight only visible to me – a fight against a constant opponent, unseen by others and only partially understood by me.

This book is about awakenings: those little thoughts that pop up, wave a flag and tell you maybe things aren’t quite right. It’s about reckonings: those times you’ve come face to face with yourself but still refuse to accept that something has to change. And it’s about realisings: that expecting change without changing anything makes you fucking insane. It’s about what happens when your world falls apart around you. It’s about what really happens when you try to pick yourself up.

I talk a lot in this book about not knowing who I am. But even through the darkest bits, at the very core of me is a part that, although damaged, is the same as it has always been. I don’t really know what to call it. It sits near my heart, underneath layers of dirt, dented, damaged, but still fully functioning. I picture it like a small, shiny box with rounded edges. It glows, it’s warm, it exudes kindness. It wants to be helpful; it’s annoyingly people-pleasy. It’s a part of me that I feel I have unconsciously, maybe even accidentally, tried to destroy on several occasions, but it is there, and it always will be. I see it in me, I see it in the people I love, and I see it every time I look at Pickle. Pickle is my dog. She is also the love of my life; my first, my last, my everything. I fucking love that dog.

When Pickle was rescued from the side of a road in Bulgaria, she was so still that they took a body bag over to collect her. When they went to pick her up, they found that her little heart was beating very slowly. The box in her chest was shining. They took her in, and they nursed her back to health. They rescued her so that she could then rescue me. There have been many, many times where I totally identify with Pickle in that moment. Small, broken, unbelieving; but resilient, brave and hopeful. Pickle and I have the same shiny box. She was sent to help me. I just want to help other people.

I’ve spent almost three years putting the pieces together and then rearranging them to make this book make sense and not end my career before it’s even started. I want it to be helpful, hopeful, but above all honest. And I really, really hope there are some funny bits.

In that time, I have had to factory-reset a few times. At times I wasn’t well enough to write this book. At times what you will read is painful and dark. It was painful and dark to remember and it was dark and painful to write.

I’m relying on my own accounts written and kept on my computer or concealed in the far reaches of the internet. I’m relying on notes in journals dotted around my house and on my phone, and from a memory fogged not only by depression and alcohol but by lost sleep, stress, trauma and a part of my brain and heart that still needs to protect both myself and the people I love. Sobriety has made me sharp. The flashbacks have been incredibly helpful and at times mortally wounding. I may not remember everything, but there’s much I will not forget.

The book is split into three parts made up of chapters and blog excerpts, some of which have previously been published in full and unedited on my own website (alliebailey.co.uk), but most are on the internet where nobody can find them. Hidden. I did this because these pieces were just too painful for me to want my family or friends to read at the time, but I needed to release them somewhere because I had nobody else to confide in. I was scared I would be sectioned. I was scared I was a burden, but I needed to put that Allie somewhere. I had no idea that some of those blogs could possibly be of help to other people. Including them here gives those terrible parts of my life some meaning, and I really hope they are helpful. That being said, I write openly and frequently about topics and feelings that some people may find triggering. Please look after yourself as you read through it. At the end of the book there is a list of places that can help you if you feel you need someone to talk to – about your feelings, not about how shit this book is. There isn’t a helpline for that. Yet.

Music has been and will always be a hugely important part of my life, so there is a playlist that accompanies this opus; you can find it on Spotify (bit.ly/ab_runs). These are the songs I clung to in the darkest times and shouted from the rooftops in the brightest. These songs give me solace and connection as well as freedom and fuck-you energy. They are songs that take me back to exact moments in my life, both euphoric and desolate. They are my turn-shit-around songs, my something-is-wrong songs, my you-have-broken-my-fucking-heart songs, my nobody-understands-me songs. I encourage every single person that reads this book to listen to that playlist and chase up the artists in question. In some cases, these bands are as much responsible for giving me acceptance of myself and my situation as running and sobriety have been. Special mention to Frightened Rabbit, The National, Bon Iver, Biffy Clyro and Arcade Fire. On some occasions, they have stopped me from doing some pretty stupid shit, only because for the moments that I wrapped myself up in their words and music, I felt like somebody else understood me.

The title of this book comes from a question I was asked on stage at the National Running Show in 2019. I think a lot about the girl who asked this question. I wonder where she is in her journey now.

I was on a panel, hungover, anxious, depressed and ironically talking about how running can help your mental health. I was being very grown up and inspiring – the way functioning alcoholics can be. We are everywhere. You just don’t see us.

At the end of the session, a member of the audience put up her hand to ask a question. I’ll never forget this girl. She was small, tiny small, like a little bird, and looked extremely nervous. She was the personification of how I felt inside most of the time. She had oversized glasses on and spoke so quietly I could hardly hear her.

She was running her first half-marathon later that year and was exceptionally nervous about it. She asked me what would happen when she hit ‘The Wall’. The Wall, for all you non-running people out there, is generally described as a ‘condition of sudden fatigue and loss of energy which is caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles’ (cheers, Wikipedia ... ). It happens suddenly and can feel like, erm ... hitting a brick wall. It comes from running too quickly, for too long, with not enough fuel in the tank; it’s totally avoidable. But the industry has taken The Wall and used it as a bogey monster-esque marketing hook in order to make you buy things you don’t need. They have hyped The Wall into this ethereal, looming, unavoidable spectre that stands between people and their possibilities, usually about two-thirds of the way through a race.

The Wall is not real. It’s a concept. It’s a metaphor. It’s a story. It’s a possibility – one of many on any race – but it is not a fact. The Wall only exists in people’s minds.

Even though I felt like the world’s biggest fraud sitting up there, having an existential crisis about my very purpose on earth and wanting the panel to be over as quickly as possible so I could have another fucking drink, something about this question floored me. It floored me because I suddenly saw it from the other side. This girl looked terrified.

Instead of focusing on this amazing, exciting day she had coming up, a day she had prepared for and dreamt about for months, instead of planning how she would feel having completed 13.1 miles for the first time, instead of celebrating the result of all that training, all she could think about was failing. There was no question in her mind that this Wall existed. The Wall was a given, and it was going to get her. She wanted to know where it was and what it would feel like. It made me so, so sad. I just looked at her, and a message I had clearly needed to tell myself for quite some time came out of my mouth from nowhere.

‘The thing is,’ I said to her, ‘there is no wall.’

I only registered what I was saying as the words left my mouth. Here was I, sitting on a stool like a robot. Capable, honest, inspiring Allie. That’s what people saw. That is not what was going on. There was nothing going on. I was a fucking mess. It was only when this girl asked that question that my brain switched on. I was sitting there on that stool facing my own massive wall. Allie the ultrarunner, mental health campaigner, adventurer, all-round fun-times gal. That’s what people had come to see. But what I saw was Allie the anxious alcoholic; a failing, pathetic, unloveable fuck-up. Allie the mess. Allie the fraud. I was surrounded by my own wall, that I had created with my own mind. A wall that I had built brick by brick over the past two decades. A wall that I was convinced was there. A wall that was a lie. Imaginary. And this girl had just made me realise that, or at least say it out loud for the first time.

There was absolutely nothing stopping this girl from having a blinder of a half-marathon except the stories she was telling herself about this Wall. There was nothing stopping me from having a blinder of a life except the stories I was telling myself about mine. I will never forget that day. It was a lightning bolt moment of realisation. It was an awakening. An awakening that would take years to unravel and act on.

There Is No Wall.

PART ONE

THE AWAKENINGS

BLOG EXCERPT: A PROLOGUE TO MADNESS

Published 17 October 2017

Age: 36

Years drinking: 22

Years running: 9

Listen to: ‘Footshooter’ – Frightened Rabbit

I can’t honestly remember the last time I was truly happy. I don’t actually believe this happiness exists. As humans, we need to suffer to understand what it is to love and to be joyful. It’s just with some of us, the suffering presides over everything else. It’s an overarching numbness that is almost impossible to explain. In the last six months, I have been fighting with myself more than I usually do. There have been events that have tilted and knocked me, and helped me to prove to myself what a worthless individual I am. There have been moments of utter confusion and despair within social occasions I should have been enjoying. There have been many, many moments when I have truly wanted to disappear, and sometimes physically have. There have been evenings where I have drunk myself away from the noise in my head to the point of blackout. And there have been very real thoughts of suicide and very real episodes of self-harm. There have been a few hours of clarity when I have decided to get on with what I have had to do that day, and there have been days where I have actually been OK. But there have been many more days where I haven’t been OK at all. This story doesn’t start on 10 October 2017. It starts a lot longer ago than that.

I had been in the throes of an episode of depression for about three weeks before ‘the thing’ happened. I hadn’t slept much. I had been ill, a slight cold, something that looking back may have been a sign to stop. I had attended a few social gatherings I couldn’t cope with. I had got blackout drunk and screamed at two of my closest friends. I was behaving increasingly